19. 10,000 Germ Species In/On Our Body

Did you know your body is teeming with an incredible variety of bacterial wildlife? A new study from the Washington University School of Medicine in the USA reports there to be around 10,000 different species of germs living on or in our body. Researcher Dr George Weinstock said: "Our bodies are part of a microbial world." He claims there is hardly a space or area that is not home to some form of bacteria – mostly good ones. However, the report says we all accommodate low levels of harmful microbes that can cause disease or infections. Scientists say these bugs generally do no harm and live together with their friendlier counterparts who help protect our body and keep us in good health. Dr Weinstock said our bodies were smaller versions of another world: "You can think of our ecosystems like you do rainforests and oceans - very different environments with communities of organisms that possess incredible, rich diversity." He believes that studying the germs within us offer many clues to our health and why we get ill. "It's not possible to understand human health and disease without exploring the massive community of microorganisms we carry around with us," he said. He added: "Knowing which microbes live in various ecological niches in healthy people allows us to better investigate what goes awry in diseases." Weinstock concludes that: "The future of microbiome research is very exciting."

20. Learn In Your Sleep, Researchers Say

U.S. researchers suggest sleeping can help us remember things we have just learnt. A team from Northwestern University report that a 90-minute nap can help people learn a new skill. The article on their research is published in the June edition of the journal "Nature". The scientists say: "Information acquired during waking can be reactivated during sleep, promoting memory stabilization." Test volunteers practised musical tunes before and after a short sleep. During the nap, the researchers played one of the tunes the volunteers had practised, but not the other. The team found that the participants made fewer errors when playing the melody that had been played while they slept.

Study co-author Dr Paul J. Reuber points out the research might not work with learning a foreign language while you sleep. He said: "The critical difference is that our research shows that memory is strengthened for something you've already learned." He added: "Rather than learning something new in your sleep, we're talking about enhancing an existing memory by re-activating information recently acquired." However, Dr Reuber did say there were possibilities for language learners: "If you were learning how to speak in a foreign language during the day, for example, and then tried to reactivate those memories during sleep, perhaps you might enhance your learning," he said.

Work in pairs or groups

2. Putin is ‘Time’ magazine’s person of 2007

1. TIME MAGAZINE WINNERS: With your partner(s), discuss why the following previous winners of Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” award won. Do you think they deserved to win?

Mahatma Ghandi (1930) Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson (1936) Adolf Hitler (1938) Joseph Stalin(1939,1942) Martin Luther King Jr (1963) American Women (1975) The computer (1982)

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (1987, 1989) The Peacemakers (1993) Bill Clinton (1998) George W Bush (2000 & 2004) The American soldier (2003) Barack Obama (2008) Mark Zuckerberg (2010)